Movement
Heroes in the comics move around a lot. The GM moderates the pace of a game session, and determines when movement is important enough to be worth measuring. During casual scenes, you usually won’t have to worry about movement rates. If a hero arrives somewhere and takes a stroll around to get a feel for the place, or is flying around town on patrol, there’s no need to know exactly how fast the character goes, it just happens. Movement Pace Characters generally move at a normal, accelerated, or all out pace. A normal person’s base movement speed is 30 feet, meaning a character can walk 30 feet as a move action. The following movement paces modify your base speed: • Normal: A normal pace represents unhurried but purposeful movement at your speed, 30 feet per round for a normal unencumbered human. • Accelerated: An accelerated pace is twice your speed, 60 feet per round for a normal unencumbered human. Taking two move actions in a round is accelerated movement. • All Out: Moving four times your speed is an all out pace, the equivalent of running or sprinting, 120 feet per round for a normal unencumbered human. All out movement is a full action, and you lose your dodge bonus, since you can’t easily avoid attacks. However, if you’re using a movement power you gain a +2 Bonus to Defense per rank in that power; so a hero with Flight 5 moving all out gets a +10 Defense bonus for his speed (it’s harder to hit a fast-moving target). You can move all out for a number of rounds equal to your Constitution score. After that you must succeed at a Constitution check (DC 10) to continue moving all out. You must check again each round, and the DC increases by +1 for each check. When you fail a check, you become fatigued and must drop to an accelerated or normal pace. Characters with movement powers have a normal speed granted by their rank. Accelerated movement doubles that speed. All out movement quadruples it. Hampered Movement Obstructions, bad surface conditions, and poor visibility hamper movement. The GM determines the category into which a specific condition falls (see the Hampered Movement Table). When movement is hampered, multiply movement speed by the penalty (a fraction). For example, a character that normally could cover 60 feet with an accelerated move can cover only 30 feet while moving through thick undergrowth. If more than one condition applies, multiply speed by all appropriate movement penalty fractions. For instance, a character that normally could cover 60 feet with an accelerated move covers only 15 feet moving through thick undergrowth in heavy fog (one-half times one-half, or one-quarter his accelerated move speed). Jumping Jumping is a special type of movement, based on your Strength. A jump is a move action. Distance moved by jumping counts as part of your normal movement in a round. You can make a running long jump of (Str modifier + 10) feet, a standing long jump of half that distance, and a high (vertical) jump of a quarter that distance. Round all distances down to the nearest foot. So a Strength 10 (+0 modifier) character can make a running long jump of 10 feet, a standing long jump of 5 feet and a high jump of 2 feet (2.5, rounded down to 2). Increases to your Strength, including extra effort (see page 120), increase your jumping distances as well. Super-Strength does not increase jumping distances. Extra effort doubles your jumping distance for one jump. The Leaping power greatly increases the distance you can jump. If you make a long jump and fail to clear the distance by your height or less, you can make a Reflex save (DC 15) to grab the far edge of a gap. Miles Per Hour vs. Feet Per Round Normal human-scale movement is given in feet per six-second round, but heroes and vehicles can often move much faster, measured in miles per hour. If you need to convert between the two, you can use the following guidelines: • Approximate: An easy approximation is: miles per hour = feet per round/10. So 120 feet per round is about 12 miles per hour, and 60 miles per hour is about 600 feet per round. This is a rough approximation, but it’s sufficient for a ballpark figure if you just want a general idea how fast something is moving. • Precise: A more precise calculation is: (feet per round × 600)/5,280, that’s the number of feet in six seconds, times 600 to get the number of feet in an hour, divided by the number of feet in a mile for miles per hour. With this formula, 120 feet per round equals (120 × 600) or 72,000, divided by 5,280, or 13.6 miles per hour. Likewise, 60 MPH equals (60 × 5,280 feet) or 316,800 feet per hour, divided by 600, or 528 feet per round. This material is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.